outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

My now-hopeless desire was for masking to be normalized and stick around forever because I hate colds and the flu.

Yes. No colds since 2019 and I like it.

the extreme drop off in the flu is pretty neat...cool to see direct evidence that masks & social distancing does in fact work extremely well

the KN95s are indeed dope, I get less of them for my money than I did surgical masks, but they offer better protection.

and as cool as my Iron Maiden mask is, it's not layered

horns up, mfer!

we should paint each individual mask we wear with our own designs and create a thread of custom ILX mask artwork

San Francisco update: a quarter of the eligible city population has received at least a first dose, two-thirds of the 65-and-over population have received a first dose. Second dose levels now into double-digits in general, almost a third of 65-and-over have a second dose. My sis got her first shot the other day; my folks have received their second shots. All good to see.

I think I'll just get a face tattoo that looks like a mask

congrats to your fam Ned. It's a great relief i'm sure.

Which part of SF are your folks in Ned?

Here's my more realistic San Francisco update:

https://i.imgur.com/izp4SIL.png

The death rate is pretty stagnant (~80% of peak COVID deaths) all things considered... which I know some of you guys have been promising it will go down for a month yet here we are.

Just walking around and seeing a surge of maskless people eating indoors makes me think this trend line ain't going down any time soon. Hope that arugula pizza was worth killing someone's grandmother over.

Also none of the teachers at my kids schools have received their codes to make them eligible for vaccines yet, our only partially-vaccinated friend is dancing tonight at the Crazy Horse strip club (which is now open).

Yikes! Hopefully it's just the peep show booths!?
My partner is a teacher and was able to get her first shot at Walgreens last week. She just had to show her faculty ID. Hopefully things move quickly for your kids teachers.

From a nextdoor email notification I got last week. Welcome to the neighborhood, lady!

Subj: Unstable racist man yelling on Stevenson

I was jarred at around 7:30 this morning to hear a presumably unstable and mentally ill man shouting heinous racist and violent remarks on Stevenson by the Skate Park. Needless to say, it was horrifying. Is this an ongoing issue? I just moved into the neighborhood last week. I was too scared to open... See more

Lol, sorry, meant for SF thread

Ppl moving in and finding out they don’t like the neighbors can keep it to themselves tbh

Just gonna respond to that here #onethread

Stepping back a bit -- sorry, should have added that my folks live in Carmel, so they were working with the Monterey County setup. My sis is in SF, though (recently moved from Inner Sunset to near Glen Canyon Park).

anyone here knowledgeable about lateral flow test false positive rate? almost everything says it's very very low except for one bmj article which cites a study which tested 43,000 Scottish students and found an estimated rate of 58%! however the original study is no longer found at the link. What gives? fyi this is to (not) solve a family argument. https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4941
https://beta.isdscotland.org/media/6975/20-12-16-covid19-publication_report.pdf

my son is about to start biweekly lateral flow tests next week at his school

my son went back last Monday and we've already got a letter informing us one of the teachers tested positive and all students who were in contact are self-isolating.

well as parents we've been told we "can" (not should or must) get bi weekly tests, but my sister in law and family say they'll stop bubbling with us as they can't afford to self isolate if we test positive.

xp

Let's just say that most 65-y-olds -- the cohort getting vaccinated -- are not the ones packing Applebee's bars.

https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-more-than-40-of-over-80s-have-broken-lockdown-rules-since-getting-vaccinated-ons-says-12235713

I can drink an an Applebee's in Bristol?

I still think false negatives are more concerning in terms of affecting behaviour, but the focus has shifted onto the consequences of false positives -but these are still going to be a very small percent of a small number re the LFTs. I don't think we really know what either the false pos/neg rates are (and won't, as they are stopping confirming positives with PCRs).

We've also been given the option to test twice weekly (as parents).
Calz, that's shit for you! Is your kid testing too? How is he with it?

not wearing a mask in public in the middle of a pandemic (cases are higher now than they were in the summer wave!) is a great way to say "i'm a dangerous asshole to strangers, whether or not you've been vaccinated.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Friday, March 5, 2021 3:36 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

OTMFM.

xp

They've managed to test him once so far and said he was very co-operative and there were no problems, he's got used to annual flu injections and is lot more chill about staying still a minute for a swab or whatever they do - it would have a different story 5 years ago! The teacher who tested positive was from a different bubble so he's fine for now.

he's very lucky that he has the luxury of small class sizes and the bubbling/testing regime is probably much easier to maintain than out in the big schools. I feel more sorry for people with kids going back into big classrooms and the no doubt very difficult attempts to maintain covid-safe conditions in near chaos!

Glad he's ok with it. We're lucky to have a smallish school and no cases so far but I'm still Staying Alert!

Found out today that my landlord caught COVID on February 1 and died of it on March 1. Spare me ILX's ritualistic dekulakization bullshit; he was a good guy and I'll miss him. He owned my building in partnership with his sister, so according to his son nothing will change as far as rent, selling the building, etc.

Sorry to hear that, unperson. RIP.

How awful, I'm so sorry.

I'm mostly worried because a lot of the stupid fucks that live in the building walk around maskless, bring friends over on the weekends, etc. He always wore a mask when he was in my apartment, but who knows if one of my neighbors gave it to him?

I think it's still true that masks protect others more than they protect you, especially now that the more virulent new variants are taking over, so it's not impossible, provided he actually spent a non-negligible amount of time in the presence of these jerkoffs.

sorry to hear unperson but glad that it's not impacting your living situation.
After Sandy demolished the block i lived on, the owner of my building rebuilt and then had a heart attack without a will. His brother moved his mother into my apartment about four months later iirc

Like a lot of things I think masks are cumulative. They offer you some protection, they offer others more, but they offer the most when most people wear them.

Also sorry to hear about your landlord UP

2.9m doses administered in the US today.

Three people I know in their late 40s got their appointment call yesterday. Hope that means I’m up sooner rather than later.

2.9m doses administered in the US today.

As someone with one but not two relevant comorbidities (I use an immune-modulating medication) I still seem to be another two months away per WA guidance? Maybe that’ll change again in a week, it’s another two weeks before they activate phase 1B2 and start vaccinating grocery store workers etc

Seems bad

Extent of damage to AstraZeneca vaccine’s perceived safety in Europe revealed

% saying they would refuse this vaccine and wait for a diff one

AstraZeneca 🇩🇪27% 🇫🇷22% 🇮🇹 23% 🇪🇸19% 🇬🇧2%
Pfizer 🇩🇪6% 🇫🇷7% 🇮🇹 7% 🇪🇸5% 🇬🇧4%
Moderna 🇩🇪12% 🇫🇷11% 🇮🇹 11% 🇪🇸6% 🇬🇧5%https://t.co/rppoUptxIO pic.twitter.com/yY6rpEcxIJ

— YouGov (@YouGov) March 7, 2021

*I should say presumably from long Covid, as he was healthy prior to getting Covid and spoke of how bad his symptoms were following a lung function test, just before he passed. Here’s an article about him https://t.co/0per6WxYeJ

— M. Elliott Rollé (@melliottr) March 8, 2021

It's very sad looking at Ed's last living days via his TL posting about his struggles with severe long covid symptoms.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-08/u-s-coronavirus-cases-have-slowest-weekly-gain-of-the-pandemic

With the U.S. vaccination effort picking up speed, new coronavirus cases in the U.S. rose 1.5% in the week ended Sunday, the slowest increase since the pandemic began almost a year ago.

The U.S. reported 420,285 infections for the week, after recording 471,198 cases in the prior seven days, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University and Bloomberg. The percentage gain was the smallest since Bloomberg began tracking cases in January 2020.

In the past week, an average of 2.16 million vaccine doses per day were administered in the U.S., with the total number of shots reaching 90.4 million, according to the Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker.

At the same time, many state and local governments are easing mitigation measures as warmer weather and family holidays approach and virus variants gain strength. That’s spurring some concern that the virus could gain new footholds ahead.

It’s no time to relax, Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser on the pandemic, said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” U.S. cases remain “very high” and a rush to lift virus-related restrictions risks triggering another surge, he said.

family holidays approach

could just as well have said Passover & Easter.

So yeah, our mayor just sent out an email basically blasting our state and county officials. He says that not only have they still not seen any increase in distribution, they've been told not to expect any increase in March either. Also, our city's residents are specifically being excluded from mass vaccination sites in Chicago proper, because we have our own health department. But our health department isn't getting enough supplies. What a fucking mess.

A few choice quotes:

The State’s current approach to vaccine distribution appears to favor setting up large Mass Vaccination (MassVac) sites over utilizing our existing public health infrastructure. Although MassVac sites should certainly play a role in a national vaccination campaign of this scale, I’m concerned that our local public health department and our hospitals, which are well prepared, trained and equipped to administer large quantities of vaccine to the community, are being vastly underutilized.

Between the City and our healthcare institutions, we have the capacity to vaccinate at least 10,000 people a week — if we have the vaccines. We are dealing with a supply issue, not a capacity issue.

Because we have a certified public health department, residents are currently excluded from the Cook County MassVac sites. Given the limited supplies allocated to us, this is simply not fair to our residents. We’ve voiced this concern to the County and the State, and are hopeful that residents will soon be able to register for the vaccine at these locations.

and in response to a specific question about Biden saying all teachers will get their first shots this month:

We support that goal and also want our kids back in the classroom. However, we have not yet been presented with an implementation plan and corresponding vaccines to carry out this objective. At 1,200 to 1,400 first doses a week, and still thousands of seniors to vaccinate, we lack the supplies to vaccinate other essential workers in Phase 1B at this time.

Good to have confirmation that all of Biden's promises are full of absolute horseshit.

I'll shut the fuck up now, I just haven't felt this bleak about moving past COVID in months. This was a slap of reality in the face of all the optimistic news we've been seeing.

this wouldn't be the same mayor you have previously said was full of horseshit?

I hope he's full of shit, honestly. It's just such a bleak update that is so at odds with the optimism we're seeing most places.

This seems pretty good news

Full vaccination (two doses) of the Pfizer/BioNTech lays waste to the most infamous variants. https://t.co/qKDloX4OUx pic.twitter.com/bA52AjdY9q

— Andrew L. Croxford (@andrew_croxford) March 8, 2021